How much more powerful will civilian weapons get as gun manufacturers, gun rights groups and their lackeys in public office escalate their assault on the lives of Americans?
Gun manufacturing is very big business. It wants big profits. But that means it must change and adapt. After the market started to get saturated with handguns, the industry successfully turned to promoting powerful military-style firearms capable of spreading far greater mayhem. Deaths and injuries soared as shooters used them.
The pain and loss echo at Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Las Vegas, Parkland, Buffalo, Orlando, San Bernardino and elsewhere. More such shootings, more agony. more tears are undoubtedly in our future.
The Washington Post recently reported how the new powerful weapons can eviscerate the bodies of victims. One in 20 Americans now has at least one AR-style rifle.
As we view the terrifying videos of the shooting that killed three children and three adults in Nashville, we have to ask: What will be added to the arsenal on the streets that’s even worse? What weapons, perhaps unthinkable today, will be in the hands of killers tomorrow?
Will the industry be heavily marketing 50-caliber rifles that the Violence Policy Center says can penetrate light armor, down helicopters, destroy commercial aircraft or blast through rail cars? One gun marketer already is touting the 50-caliber rifle as “an elite weapon of which there is no comparison.” Is the proliferation of those weapons in our future?
America should not wait for that answer. It should rouse itself and demand reforms.
Those who profit from the donations and political support of the gun industry react to each horrific shooting by throwing out verbal smokescreens to stop commonsense reforms from taking root. They claim America can continue to be a nation full of virtually unregulated or lightly regulated weaponry if this diversionary policy or that useless rule is put into place, but time and again those claims are debunked.
After the Nashville shooting, a parade of gun-friendly politicians said, in effect: “It’s unfortunate, but what can we do?”
To them, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same nothing-to-see-here-folks attitude they’ve been getting away with for far too long.
Other nations have citizens with mental health issues. They have schools without steel doors. They don’t have more “good guys with guns.” They don’t arm teachers. Evil is also present in those nations. But the United States suffers from far more gun deaths per capita than those other nations do. More people may die from gun-related violence in the United States in just one week than may die from guns in all the nations in Western Europe in an entire year.
Beyond tragically wounding and killing people, gun violence fills communities with social trauma and undermines their economies.
In Illinois, those who oppose gun violence have been working to pass laws to chip away at the carnage. On Jan. 10, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a measure to ban assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. Gun advocates immediately took to court. But when other states take a hands-off approach to guns, it limits how much Illinois can do.
In Tennessee, the shooter legally bought seven guns from local gun stores and carried two AR-style guns and another handgun into The Covenant School. Tennessee does not require a waiting period or a license to buy guns. It does not have a “red flag” law that allows friends or family to ask that guns be removed temporarily from people who are a danger to themselves or others. Maybe none of that might have mattered in this case, but wisely crafted laws can save lives.
It’s up to Americans to make it clear they won’t accept the status quo.
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